1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of protection and recovery of computer system data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data protection for computer systems is an important part of ensuring that the information generated on a computer system and/or stored on the computer system is not lost due to the occurrence of a hardware failure, a software failure, user error, or other environmental event (e.g. power outage, natural disaster, intentionally-caused disaster, accidental disaster, etc.). Generally, events that the data protection scheme is designed to protect against are referred to herein as disaster events. The data protection scheme attempts to make redundant copies of the data and locate those copies such that the data is safe from the disaster events and such that the data can be restored to the computer system or to another computer system rapidly enough to be acceptable given the nature of the data, its importance to the creator of the data, etc.
While restoration of the data after a disaster event is part of recovery, restoration alone may not be enough to ensure recovery. Generally, recovery refers to actually bringing back into operation the applications and other software/functionality that were in operation on a computer system or systems prior to the disaster event. Generally, the application software, the underlying operating system software, and data/configuration files for the application and operating system must be restored to a logically consistent state to permit recovery. The number of components that need to be restored in consistent state may be large, and dependencies of components on each other may not be clear at the time of recovery. Which components need to be restored prior to others may also not be clear. For example, if an operating system driver is to be recovered, then the applications running on that operating system may need to be restarted. However, if the driver was corrupted due to a hardware failure, the hardware may need to be replaced and a more complex recovery involving restoring, reconfiguring, and restarting the applications on the new hardware may be needed.
Recovery is frequently performed under significant time pressure. The pressure, and the complexity of properly recovering, may frequently lead to mistakes on the part of the individuals responsible for performing the recovery (e.g. information technology (IT) professionals, also referred to as administrators). The recovery time may be lengthened significantly. Particularly, which components require recovery and in which order the components are to be recovered may be a source of error. In many cases, it is only the experience of the administrators in similar previous recoveries that indicates the recovery process for a current recovery. A less experienced administrator may be less likely to rapidly perform a correct recovery.